Issue #7-8
July-August Report
_________________________________A Tale of Itch.io, Cleaning and Summer
Hey everybody, how are you?
Last month I was too lazy to create a report, thus here we have a double one. This were the couple of months in which typically I would have gone somewhere on holiday for some days, but this year was strange. So, no travel. Just work - some work from home, relaxing, but that’s just not the same. Well, on the good side of it, I had more time to play games.
I decided to do a cleanup of the games installed on my PC, by simply uninstalling the “eternal” ones - like Civ, or CKII - and trying to complete the other ones. The strategy is working quite well, now I only have 10 games on my laptop, I will defeat them, I hope.
On the other hand, I started trying random games from the Bundle for Racial Justice, from Itch.io, and I have to say that I’m satisfied for the moment. I found some interesting concepts, some - as expected - incomplete games, but at least one gem: Spring Falls is a great, chill, relaxing puzzle game. I’m not featuring it in the “cover” of the report just for one reason: it is a cool and well polished game, more than Open Sorcery, but the latter is a much more interesting experience. Of course it’s pretty absurd to try to compare two such different games.
* as shown by GOG Galaxy 2.0
Open Sorcery 
Amazing, text-based game! The idea of mixing technology and magic is performed in such a great way, it is really able to make you empathise with BEL/s. And in addition to this, it's also funny. The only negative aspect: it's far too short for being this good!
Played on Itch.io.
Open Sorcery: Jingle BEL/S
Good sequel to Open Sorcery. A lot of attention to details and dialogues. Funny setting. Maybe a little too "static".
Played on Itch.io.
Pirates meet LEGO: in this game you can build your ship one piece at a time, so that the only limit to the ship shape is your fantasy (and the laws of hydrostatic and hydrodynamics, of course). There is a campaign, with some (pretty repetitive) missions, but the heart of the game is in the sandbox mode. The controls could be improved, as they're not always perfectly controllable. The main drawback is that this Early Access will be Early Access forever: it's been officially abandoned. Thus, the world is pretty empty, as well as many features are missing. It's a pity, as this was indeed a great start for the game.
Played on Steam.
A good sequel to Puzzle Agent. Nelson gets back to Scoggins, in order to solve completely the mysteries that he uncovered in the first chapter. There he will meet the usual crazy people, and a lot of puzzles. Tipically very easy puzzles.
Played on Steam.
Pixel Session Vol.1
A nice project, a collection of funny, psychedelic arcade minigames quite challenging but not too hard, usually.
Played on Itch.io.
Attrition: Tactical Fronts
Nice little, hex-based strategy game. Looks like a couple GB game I played in the past. Interesting the dependence of power from the terrain and the unit health, and the special abilities of the various units. On the negative side, AI is too easy to beat. And even more, on this platform the game is abandoned in a beta state.
Played on Itch.io.
Dominique Pamplemousse in “It’s All Over Once The Fat Lady Sings!"
The game is peculiar. The story and dialogues told through songs, like it was a musical: never seen something like this before. The visual art is pretty bad - but that's wanted, and is cool in some way. The music is funny. "Linear" story, simple game. Right length. The only strange and useless thing in the game: the random talks about Dominique sexuality. They don't mean anything in the story, and every time they look artificial additions to the dialogues.
But there's a lot of issues having this version work on Win 10: compatibility issues, and the need of "Run as Admin"! That's the reason for the low rating.
Played on Itch.io.
A relaxing, short experience. A world wonderfully crafted, there to be coloured doing some parkour on it. The art is minimal, but still beautiful.
Played on Steam.
Toaster Jam
A short (only 40 levels), joyful experience in which you - a flying toaster - jump around breakfast-themed scenarios, collecting slices of bread and avoiding evil forks and donuts. And you can unlock funny skins for the toaster! In short, it's a casual, easy game, with pleasant art. It looks a lot like a mobile game. As an added value, there's a level editor, so you can (in principle) have an infinite number of levels to create (or download) and play.
Played on Itch.io.
A cool strategy/resource management game, extremely easy to learn, and very hard to master. You play simply using one button to interact, and 2 arrows to move. The playtime is divided in 2: during the day you can explore, build and so on; during the night, monsters will attack your village. There are two kinds of workers you can hire, and two kinds of fighters. You must plan well, avoid wasting money and leaving your peasants unprotected by walls and archers. In the end, winning means destroying all the 4 enemy portals, but you must avoid attacking before you are very ready: the consequences would be terrible. There is more or less just one strategy that will bring you to victory, and an error - tipically due to haste - will not be forgiven, and you will probably have to restart from the beginning.
In addition to this, the music is fine, and the pixel art is really good-looking.
Played on Steam.
A funny turn-based strategy game, set in an interesting afterlife world for Japanese samurai warriors. It offers quite a number of different units with their special abilities, and some (not many) mechanics for collecting resources and upgrading units. Overall it is a quite simple game, perfect for relax. The cartoonish graphics is good, too, and the game dialogues feature a nice sense of humour.
Played on Steam.
Dominique Pamplemousse and Dominique Pamplemousse in "Combinatorial Explosion!"
The aesthetics is in the same style of its prequel: "ugly", but in a stylish way, with a reason. The experience is good, with funny music. The situations and scenes are pretty varied and totally absurd. But it's not a game. A funny experience, anyway.
Played on Itch.io.
Sheepless Nights
An ok-ish math card game, inspired by UNO and Hearts. With a couple of rules to let you use math. Mainly focused on children: an adult will be quickly bored, as it it really easy to beat. The game is extremely luck based, and strategies are nearly impossible to implement, due to the endless deck. The AI is not good, and there are not real differences in the various difficulty levels. Also, there are random bugs that let you play more cards than you should. From the artistic point of view, the decoration of the cards is nice and funny.
Played on Itch.io.
Spring Falls
A great, peaceful experience, where you have to bring water to flowers in order to make them grow. Really relaxing are the ambient sounds and music, and pleasant are the visuals and the colours. From the point of view of the gameplay, this game offers a collection of puzzles - pretty straightforward in the most cases - with a slow increase in the difficulty curve and the addition of new mechanisms going forward with the levels.
Played on Itch.io.
Hector: Badge of Carnage 
An ok P&C adventure. It's pretty stupid, and as usual the solution to some puzzles is just "senseless". But still, this was funny. One drawback for non-native english speakers: this game focuses a lot on dialogues and puns, and the dialogues are usually in a slang, not in correct english. Thus it may be hard to understand what is being said.
Played on Steam.
July: Steam Sales
I don't usually buy games from Steam...
August: Decades
That's strange, I found just one game in my library fitting the theme, and I wasn't in the right mood to play it. So it goes.
July: Mouse's favourite things
Yeah, the story of this game is long and well known, the bad behaviour of the devs, the incomplete form of the game at the beginning, and so on. At the current version, the game is not bad. For a price tag of 5-10€, at least. Sure this is not what you can expect after spending 50€ for it. Content-wise: a lot of tennis players missing, a lot of tournaments missing. Extremely low level of personalization, extremely low variability. Just, one match after another. Gameplay-wise: the movements are often clunky, and the physics is pretty strange. Sometimes you ask for a certain shot, and your player does another one. When the player "engages" the ball, he will shot it quite well in the opponent's field - even if he is running in the opposite direction, falling out of equilibrium, catching it just with the tip of the racket. On the other side, he will sometimes completely fail to engage a near and simple ball. Also, AI is not really good: all the players play more or less the same, thus beating king Roger will be as simple as beating the weakest of the players.
Played on Steam.
August: Mouse's favourite national days
This month was a pass for me.
September is coming.
Why does open sorcery say it has no achievements? It has 57. (Only noticed b/c it’s on my to do list.)
Because I have (thus I played) it on Itch.io, and there you have no achievements. When the game is available on Steam I link the Steam page anyway, for it offers a much more complete overview of the game, it’s a reference.
Ahh alright! Thank you!